Release Gulet Mohamed

Gulet Mohamed found out the hard way that traveling to Yemen and Kuwait is dangerous if you are a US citizen. Mr. Mohamed was arrested when he tried to renew his visa in Kuwait, then he was subsequently beaten severely and “threatened with even worse forms of torture.” You can read about what happened to him here, here and here.

From the New York Times article:

The teenager, Gulet Mohamed, a Somali-American who turned 19 during his captivity, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday from a Kuwaiti detention cell that he was beaten with sticks, forced to stand for hours, threatened with electric shocks and warned that his mother would be imprisoned if he did not give truthful answers about his travels in Yemen and Somalia in 2009.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Gulet Mohamed has “been charged with no crime and presented with no evidence of any wrongdoing,” which violates Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 9 states: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Furthermore, Article 5 states: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

In addition, Article 10 states: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

From what I have read, US officials are more concerned about asking Mr. Gulet if he knows Anwar Al-Awlaki, who is a Yemeni clerk and terror suspect, rather than helping a US citizen who has been falsely imprisoned, mistreated, beaten and threatened; basically, all his rights have been stripped from him.